One of Asia's leading media moguls, Jimmy Lai, said Wednesday that newspapers faced a tough battle to survive and that providing content on the Internet for free was not a sustainable position.
Lai, who owns the Apple Daily title in Hong Kong and newspapers in Taiwan, said the newspaper industry faced a "problem of survival" as it struggles to attract a new generation of readers used to TV, computer games or the Internet.
He told the Foreign Correspondents' Club in Hong Kong that the industry had to remain "creative" if it wanted to keep its market share.
He also said media companies had to charge for some online content, which is given away for free by many newspapers.
"We have got to charge for something. This is not social work," he said.
"I do not know how Twitter or Facebook is going to make money. They are fantastic, but where is the money?"
Lai made his first fortune with the Giordano clothing chain, but got into newspapers and magazines following the military crackdown on the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989.
He has since become one of the leading anti-Communist Party voices in Hong Kong, while building a media empire.
Newspapers across the world have struggled in recent years to hold on to readers who have migrated to free content on the Internet and blogs for their news, dragging much of the crucial advertising revenue with them.
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